Image Gallery

Roy Tuley Collection

The daughters of Roy Tuley have graciously provided digital donations of some excellent images taken from the 1930s-1960s. Tuley (1916-1975) was a photographer for the Chattanooga Times beginning in the 1940s. He established his own freelance business and was a well-known private photographer around Chattanooga in the 50s and 60s. His name appears as photo credit on many postcards of the era as well. Like most professional photographers at that time, he used a 'medium format' camera. The word medium is misleading, as the negatives are 5 x 4 inches each, or approximately 15 times larger than 35mm film. The results are apparent in the details. Each negative was scanned at 2400dpi and cleaned up in Photoshop prior to creating a deep zoom.
Read More

Panoramas

Panoramas have been created from multiple images taken at the same photo session. The largest and most impressive images on this site were also the first created, years before the website was created.
They are the panoramas from 1902 and 1909 - taken from Cameron Hill. Four 8x10 glass plate negatives each were carefully aligned to create each. The level of details and depth of zoom is impressive. Each set was taken by commercial photographers for resale in postcards and prints but are now in the public domain. The images were scanned by the Library of Congress at high resolution, and made available in 2010.

Negatives

Film negatives produce the best quality zoom collections and contain far more details than printed copies. And, 100+ year old 8 x 10 inch glass plate negatives hold a lot of detail, often 55 Megapixels or more by current digital standards. Now consider a ‘Full HD’ monitor can only display just over 2 Megapixels, it becomes clear why deep zoom technology is useful to enjoy and explore these treasures from our past.